Even though I feel it's somewhat pointless to ponder the fate of the universe I've been wondering about one possible scenario in contrast to the most widely accepted current theory that the cosmos will continue expanding till it evaporates into nothingness. My thoughts are leaning toward a fate where the black holes at the centers of the biggest galaxies start to grow exponentially until they start eating each other and all the smaller galaxies until at the end some critical mass is reached and then the next bang. This is sort of like the old expansion and contraction repeating cycles with a slightly different twist in the form of a single cosmic black hole forming right at the end of the cycle.Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

You are part of the way towards the theory I have been long proposing.

The universe is infinite i.e. it goes on and on in every direction for ever, it always has done and always will do. But scattered within it are various super massive black holes. In time these devour so much mass that they simply cannot retain it, and explode in a big bang.

What we are seeing now is the result of our local big bang in our particular part of the universe. Elsewhere there are other big bangs happening. In time the remnants of our big bang will expand sufficiently to get swallowed up by another super massive black hole, and another big bang will happen somewhere else.

Think of the universe as a pan of bubbling soup, where the big bangs are the bubbles. The thing is where does the energy come from to keep the soup bubbling.... Dark matter? we do not yet know.

Jill Tarter's analogy for 50 years of SETI searching compared to the vast volume of space being like a glass of water dipped out of the ocean could also apply, IMO, to what we know about the Universe so far.

Our ancestors might have thought there was no point in sailing too far from land because they could only see or imagine more ocean out there, which they 'knew' had to end somewhere.... Our vantage point from Earth and its vicinity is just as limited as theirs was compared to the scale of what we can see from here.

We just don't know yet. And there's no way to estimate how much we don't know.

What I have been seeing on TV, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but the galaxies are flying away from each other faster and faster. What I haven't seen is anything saying the galaxies are overcoming gravity, and expanding. This meaning the distance between stars is not increasing, only the distance between galaxies.

I have seen a show where they theorize that there is another universe outside of the bounds of our own, as some galactic clusters do seem to be traveling in a direction not due to expanding away from a central point. If another universe was there, then perhaps its gravity could be the dark energy blaimed for our own increasing speed.

Perhaps dark energy is nothing more than gravity coming from something very massive outside our range to detect it. This is just random speculation, and I have nothing to back it up with.

It could be that the vacuum contains an energy and that if the Universe is expanding then more vacuum and more energy is being created. Since this involves creating something from nothing I find it more appealing to theorize that the universe is spinning and therefore flinging it's masses outward.

What and where is the axis of spin ?? Perhaps in another dimension.

Gravity from another large universe would also seem like an explanation.

I mentioned in a previous thread that our universe has to
be billions of times bigger than we can persieve it
(due to the limitations of the speed of light).
Gravitational effects of the actual universe as it
exists could also be billions of times larger.
We know there should be more mass in the universe,
but we can only persieve the visible universe.
Gravity or it's effects aren't bound by the speed of light,
so possibly "dark matter" doesn't exist and our
perception that there should be more mass is just the
gravitational effects of a much larger (invisible to us)
universe.??